Moveable seats are used in many vehicles (e.g., cars, trucks, and airplanes) and require stability, strength and durability in order to ensure the comfort and safety of travelers. In this regard, moveable seats must have a design that enables occupants to safely change configurations and/or orientations of the seat with minimal exertion while engaging in other tasks. This is of particular importance to business travelers who tend to travel often and for extended periods and tend to have to carry out business tasks while traveling and while occupying the seat.
Most conventional seats have base assemblies that allow movement in a limited number of directions, e.g., in a single plane, such as back and forth, side-to-side, or rotational. Moreover, while some conventional seats have base assemblies that allow for movement in all directions (i.e., omni-directional), these seats typically require separate controls for each direction of movement and/or they lack swivel pedestals with components that can maintain an optimal configuration throughout use of the movable seat. U.S. Pat. No. 5,161,765, for example, the entire content of which is incorporated by reference herein, discloses a seat having a control disk that is operably-connected to cables controlling lateral and rotational movement of the seat, and a rotatable flat disk supported atop ball bearings atop a second flat bottom disk. Because normal changes of a moveable seat's configuration and/or orientation naturally results in changing forces upon the swivel assembly or pedestal of the seat, conventional seats typically have swivel pedestals with components that tend to shift laterally from their intended axis of rotation. This shifting causes extraneous side-to-side movement amongst the components of conventional tapered swivel assemblies. Traditional efforts to correct for this lateral shifting of components of swivel assemblies, e.g., through use of high molecular weight polyethylene, are costly and imprecise.
Accordingly, there is a need for a moveable seat, the configuration and orientation of which can be easily, efficiently, and safely changed by an occupant of the seat, through use of a single lever mechanism within reach of the occupant, without sacrificing performance and/or stability of the seat, based on the forces resulting from the change in configuration and/or orientation of the seat. The present invention provides such a moveable seat.